The computer gaming industry has seen tremendous growth and now includes a wide variety of platforms including hand-held games, software games executing on a desktop computer, dedicated gaming machines such as Nintendo and the Sony PlayStation, and online games provided over computer networks such as the World Wide Web (WWW). The games range from simply action-oriented games designed to test the user's reflexes to interactive, role-playing games where the user interacts with characters in a two-dimensional or three-dimensional gaming environment.
With the migration of computer games to the WWW, more and more people are participating in interactive games in which players interact with each other or with a number of predefined characters. Some games may even have predefined modular stories that can be reused to control the settings for the game.